Spanish bombs

After Franco's rebel troops rose against the republican government in 1936, more than 1,000 foreign journalists flocked to Spain. It is hard to imagine today the impact produced by the cables these correspondents sent around the world. British journalist George Steer's report on the German bombing of Guernica - quoted in full - was one of the first foretastes of what might be expected from Hitler's Germany. While we do learn that Hemingway was boorish but energetic and Orwell was more tourist than dedicated journalist, this passionate and absorbing study focuses on unsung writers who took the trouble to see for themselves. And just as the now largely forgotten journalists changed people's minds about the war, they were themselves changed by it. The book ends with the paradox that many felt most alive when surrounded by death and destruction. As Josephine Herbst, one of the writers resurrected by Preston, wrote in the 1960s: "Nothing so vital, either in my personal life or in the life of the world, has ever come again."